


I Can Fix That

by J_Nerd



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, all the fluff for you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 11:32:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10943649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_Nerd/pseuds/J_Nerd
Summary: It was Holtzmann’s preferred mantra since…well, since she’d first closed her little fist around a screwdriverOrWhen "I can fix that," actually means "I love you"OrI watched Holes again and got feels and an idea





	I Can Fix That

“I can fix that!”

It was Holtzmann’s preferred mantra since…well, since she’d first closed her little fist around a screwdriver at five and started making “repairs” to appliances around her home. Growing up, her mother heard that more than “I love you”—only slightly more on account Jillian was an affectionate child. It began as something said with a grin that showed too much teeth, a giggle trailing on the end like a kite caught by the wind. Innocent. Welcome. Laughed at during family gatherings and awed at during community functions. It was a novelty.

But childlike innocence was not something long meant for this world. Like snow, the delicate and fragile beauty melted under the heat of forced maturity. Childhood was fleeting. The bumps and tumbles of a child, once seen as amusing or adorable, morphed into annoyances met with sharp reproaches and sometimes sharper hands—depending on the family member. The smiles disappeared, replaced with deep scowls and louder voices.

Holtzmann quickly learned that the playfulness of her mantra had to stop. She couldn’t say it with a confident smile and expect a hand not to fly at her when she took apart her uncle’s TV and forgot to solder the right wires back into place. She couldn’t roll it off her tongue with a giggle when she experimented with her cousin’s dirt bike and wound up with three leftover screws after reassembling the engine—it had caught fire and she’s caught hell for it. And she certainly couldn’t pull off a playful wince when she’d disassembled a washing machine from the inside out and the local laundromat, flooding the tiny building with enough suds to make Mr. Bubble proud.  

“I can fix that,” turned into a plea for more time. For leniency. For forgiveness. Oftentimes pushed from her lips with a blanch in her shoulders and a raised hand to ward off a blow. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But she always tried. Her mother and father understood. They’d birthed a curious child with curious tendencies, but the world was far less understanding when that same curious creature undid its careful stitching.

So Holtzmann tempered herself—or at least tried to. When she headed off to high school a full two years ahead of her siblings, she tried. Tried to fit in. Tried being just another face in the crowd. But always the curious itch was there, scratched only when she was in shop class birthing new creations, hands covered in sawdust, or taking apart appliance scraps her father salvaged from dumpsters.

Slowly, Holtzmann’s “I can fix that,” changed from a please to an offer. Her first had come Junior year in high school, a stutter making her kind gesture warble in her throat. The girl had been beautiful. A cheerleader. Of course. Holtz had seen her struggling with her car on the side of the road, steam belching from under the hood like a fog machine.

Her offer was met with wary acceptance. Jillian didn’t take it personally. People usually didn’t take her seriously. She dressed like a thrift store hobo on good days. On bad, she wore the same pair of grease-stained overalls, hair knotted at the nape of her neck, hands and arms stained to the elbows in some type of grime—oil, dirt, grease, transmission fluid…it didn’t matter.  

The beautiful girl relented with a slow nod. Jillian was off like a shot, waving away sweet-smelling steam and spotting the problem in the radiator. A hole. Easily patched. She attempted chatting. Making small talk. She was okay with that, coming across smoother than she felt and leaving women flustered and blushing. It was a game. The cheerleader was no different, but Holtz didn’t overstep where she wanted, keeping the offer of her number firmly lock behind her teeth.

The girl was beautiful.

Her boyfriend was muscular.

Jillian was gay, and she was strange enough as is. She didn’t need a target on her back. Jillian was gay but she wasn’t stupid.

“I can fix that,” got her a job in town at an auto repair shop—the owner was nice enough and the guys kept their distance…mostly—through her senior year, or at least the half she was present for before being swept off to MIT with a full ride under her belt and fresh promise singing in her veins.

Standing on the campus of a school Jillian had never dreamed she’d attend, she felt small. Back in her hometown, she was known—infamous or not. She might have been known as the town crazy, but at least she had a name and people knew of her eccentricities and quirks. They might not have been wanted, but they were tolerated. Here? Here, she was no one and had no fallback. Not yet.

The first time Holtz shouted, “I can fix that!” was in the middle of Dr. Rebecca Gorin’s open lab. One of the senior students had made a _tiny_ —it wasn’t tiny at all—mistake in calculating her current flow and wound up setting her machine and her right arm on fire. Holtz slid in like a ragamuffin firefighter, dousing the girl and the table in extinguishing foam. The machine continued to smoke and fizzle menacingly on the lab table until Jillian did what she did best. She ripped off her gloves, stuck her hands inside, and began fixing.

Five minutes later, a pair of burned hands, and one skirted lab explosion later, Holtzmann was seated in front of a mystified Dr. Gorin nursing her wounds and explaining, in detail, exactly how she’d known what to do when the math surrounding the malfunction would have taken any normal student hours to sort out.

Holtzmann gained a mentor that day and her first real taste of what it meant to be a celebrated engineer.

Over the next few years, there were many instances of “I can fix that!” Sometimes, Holtz was true to her word and mended whatever was broken, making it better than new. Making it stronger. More powerful. More sophisticated. Sometimes, it was a cry of panicked dismay as something melted down, taking all her hard work with it. Sometimes, it was whispered to herself at night when the world became too loud and she felt like all her hands were capable of doing was destroying. It certainly was like that after CERN. After watching the man she’d accidentally locked in the particle accelerator wheeled off by paramedics scrambling to restart his heart. She’d chanted her mantra like a prayer that day—a never-ending breath—up until she was dismissed from the facility and her team in shame.

“I can fix that,” no longer passed Jillian’s lips after her plane ride home. Not for a long, long time. Not even when Gorin took her into her home and tried to nurse her back into “fighting form”. Not after months of broken silence, sleepless night, crippling depression, and dark thoughts better left untouched. Not until she met a wonderful researcher working out of a rinky-dink lab at Higgins Institute of Science desperately searching for a research partner.

Holtzmann had dared to hope that day—standing in the door to the lab with her duffel on her shoulder—and that hope turned into the wildest ride of her life.

“I can fix that,” slowly started coming back to the woman. First quietly then more assertively as she found her footing. Abby was kind, caring, and most importantly _patient_. She loved Holtzmann’s “fixes” and oftentimes joined her in the work. For the first time, Jillian could admit aloud she had a true friend, and together they struck off into a field no one took seriously. Into the paranormal. Into the void. Into the unknown.

Five years and one hell of a New York paranormal event later that unknown birthed the Ghostbusters and a new family for Holtzmann, one she never imagined she’d possess. One so unlike her own family but oh so similar. One that was her all and everything, strange and slightly broken though it may be.

“I can fix that,” became a daily thing. Between repairing and refurbishing old tech and creating new tools and weapons for the ‘busters, Jillian’s days were filled with unlimited opportunities to show the stretch her creative muscle.

“I can fix that,” was said with a shrug and a smile, or a frown and a scratch to the back of her head. It was muttered over equipment, into bunches of wires, into the white-hot nucleus of a welding arc. It was spoken cheerily from the alley when she and her colleagues tested new equipment and the technical bugs made themselves known. Sometimes it was even snorted through shaking laughter when clearing slime away from Erin’s face.        

Erin. Now there was a conundrum Holtzmann couldn’t solve. It wasn’t for lack of trying. She was ace at taking things apart as much as she was at fixing them. After all, you learned to fix through disassembly. But her disassembly of Erin left her with too many pieces left over. Parts she knew went somewhere, but for the life of her she couldn’t puzzle it out. Whenever a step forward was taken Erin would shift directions, making Holtz recalibrate herself, reworking the math in her head. But it was a challenge the engineer reveled in because what kind of scientist would Holtzmann be if she left this puzzle where it lay and didn’t try her hardest to crack the code?

Birthed from curiosity and tempered in the fires of intrigue came something altogether foreign to the engineer. Yes, Jillian had been interested in women in the past. She’d bedded quite a few. Even lasted in a smattering of what would be considered “relationships” for a time, so there was no awakening to be had here for her part, but the subtle curiosity she felt towards Erin—the befuddlement left behind when her flirting wasn’t received or the rare but welcome half-smile gifted by the physicist—morphed into something altogether sharper, deeper, and warm.

“I can fix that,” quickly became a code word for three unspoken words. Holtz would find reasons to say it to Erin as much as possible.

A broken whiteboard? “I can fix that.”

Proton gun malfunction? “I can fix that.”

Slime in the eyes? “I can fix that.”

Cut arm from a bad bust? “I can fix that.”

Sniffles from a fall cold? “I can fix that.”

Each line delivered as the situation dictated but always flavored with a little more. Maybe a kinder smile or a heartier laugh. Maybe a wink—those always got her a blush from the physicist which was a win for the day. Maybe a slow, easy nod.

Intrigue became need became want and desire. This wasn’t a game anymore. For the first time. Holtzmann actively wanted to understand Erin, to get inside her head, to be something more than just a colleague and friend. It was selfish, Jillian knew. She was gay and proud. Erin…well, there was a lot about Erin she didn’t know. Too many variables to consider. Too many places where her hypotheses could be terribly wrong and no amount of “I can fix that!” would mend the broken trust. So Holtz went about her life as if it didn’t kill her inside watching Erin from the safe length of friend. She wouldn’t disassemble this woman. It wasn’t her place. It wasn’t mutually wanted. Holtz could respect that but there was never an “I can fix that,” far from her lips.

So the night she’d come back to the firehouse—mind abuzz with modifications their proton packs were in sore need of—and found Erin hunched on the couch, Holtzmann knew in her heart of hearts that someone else’s disassembly had been done to the brunette. Disassembly. It sounded so clean and orderly. There was nothing orderly about the tears leaving long streaks down Erin’s pale face, dripping off her chin when her head shot up and her glowing blue eyes caught Jillian’s. There was nothing clean about the broken fragments of her heart she cradled to her chest, freshly smashed by the man—an old colleague—she’d attempted to rekindle a relationship with. Everything about Erin was damaged and broken and fragmented, cracked and ripped and smashed to pieces, and Holtz felt something hot flood her veins.

Carefully, she set her duffle down and walked towards the woman who looked away in shame. Erin wouldn’t raise her eyes. Not willingly, and Holtz was loath to make her, but tonight was different.

Standing in front of the seated brunette was the only time Jillian was taller than Erin. The juxtaposition wasn’t off-putting. In fact, it worked in her favor. With gentle hands, Holtzmann lifted Erin’s face. The physicist went willingly. She didn’t blanch when Holtz’s thumb swept across her cheek to clear away an errant tear. She didn’t draw back from the intimate closeness of their bodies. Didn’t move. Because Jillian was looking at her in a way no one else had. She wasn’t looking at Erin for what she _could_ be. What she _would_ be once she picked herself back up and hastily glued her broken self together and soldiered on like always. Holtzmann was looking at her as she was: broken, disassembled, ruined. She was looking at the fragments and puzzling out their placement, piecing the woman back together in her mind.

Mending. Fixing. Healing.

“I can fix that.”   

It was barely a breath across her teeth, but Erin heard it as clearly as if she’d shouted. And suddenly there was molten metal flowing through her cracks and breaks, scalding her to her core, bringing the tears afresh. Not because she was hurting. She was, but healing was a painful process. At least, it always had been up until now because in that moment Erin realized like a thunderbolt to the heart what Holtzmann had been saying to her since their first meeting.

“I can fix that,” was just a roundabout way of saying, “I love you.”

The moment held for a heartbeat more until Holtz shattered the stunned stagnation by bringing their lips together. No crashing bodies. No hungry pawing. No insatiable lust. This was gentle and careful. So careful, and oh so powerful. Like colliding black holes, the mass of their gravity stalling time and space, bending it around them to fit their whims and needs. Suddenly, there’s iron forming in Erin’s unraveling star, whipping the frenzied sensations within her body into a supernova.

When at last they separate, Holtzmann had taken a seat on the coffee table in front of Erin. Though their lips aren’t touching, the physicist feels the engineer’s right hand resting over her heart like she was holding it together with her flesh and blood alone.   

“I can fix this,” she says, looking at her hand for emphasis.

Without breaking eye contact, Erin covers Holtz’s hand with her own, daring herself to take the plunge into territory she’d been anxiously terrified about entering until now.

“I love you too,” she whispers with a tearful smile that’s met with a thousand watt grin.


End file.
